Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere (In Vivo: The Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science)

Are humans unwitting partners in evolution with psychedelic plants? Darwin's Pharmacy weaves the evolutionary theory of sexual selection and the study of rhetoric together with the science and literature of psychedelic drugs. Long suppressed as components of the human tool kit, psychedelic plants can be usefully modeled as "eloquence adjuncts" that intensify a crucial component of sexual selection in humans: discourse. In doing so, they engage our awareness of the noösphere, defined by V.I. Vernadsky as the thinking stratum of the earth, the realm of consciousness feeding back onto the biosphere. Sharing intelligence, connecting with the noösphere and integrating individuality into its ecosystemic context offers powerful and promising ways to respond to ecosystems in crisis, and formed the backdrop of what Doyle dubs the "ecodelic" thought of the environmental movement. Yet current policies criminalize the use of plant-based psychedelics while simultaneously feeding a violent global black market for refined and chemically-derived drugs.

In this tour de force of "first-person science," Doyle takes his readers on a mind bending journey through the work of William Burroughs, Kary Mullis, Lynn Margulis, Timothy Leary, Norma Panduro, Albert Hoffman, Aldous Huxley, Dennis and Terrence McKenna, John Lilly and Phillip K. Dick. Readers who take the journey that is Darwin's Pharmacy will experience extraordinary insights into evolutionary theory, the war on drugs, the internet, and the nature of human consciousness itself.

Richard M. Doyle is professor of English and science, technology, and society at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of On Beyond Living and Wetwares

"Darwin's Pharmacy is a significant achievement, a brilliant, ambitious, original piece of pedagogy. I can't imagine anybody but Doyle who could control and mobilize in the name of a single vision the range and dizzying variety of the material on offer." -Brian Rotman, Ohio State University

"Darwin's Pharmacy is a beautiful book-poetry in prose and modern music in print. It is a book for all readers who have ever wondered whether dreams are another form or a different part of wakened consciousness and reality. Doyle dispenses with dualism and parallelism, expanding wonder from dreams to ecodelic states and the possibilities and difficulties of communication about these states via language." -Stanley Shostak, University of Pittsburgh